Defining feminism and feminist theory is challenging, but most feminist criminologists agree that it is more than just adding women to pre-conceived notions of crime and social control. In its most confined sense, feminism is a collection of political ideologies focused on women’s oppression to advance women’s equality through strategies for social change. In a more comprehensive, multifaceted sense and in terms of feminist scholarship, feminism is an array of interconnected contextual frames utilized for the observation, analysis and interpretation of the intricate ways in which the social realities of gendered inequality are constructed, structured, imposed and demonstrated on a macro (societal and institutional) scale to the micro (individual lived realities) scale.

Feminist criminology is commonly recognized as a main division of critical criminology and, although much of early critical criminological theory was androcentric and gender-blind, the study of gender, sex and sexuality now features prominently in this discipline. Although there are at least 12 variants of feminist criminological theory – including liberal, radical, Marxist/ socialist, postmodernist/ poststructuralist, standpoint, multiracial, Indigenous, Black, queer and intersectional – most feminist theorists explicitly theorize gender, embrace diverse empirical epistemologies and contend that many countries are characterized by patriarchy: gendered structures in which women are dominated by men (see Renzetti, 2013).

Critical feminist criminologists maintain a theoretical, empirical and policy-driven commitment to a plethora of significant social and global harms, including women and girls’ pathways to crime, drugs and the criminal–legal system; sexual harassment and intimate violence; moral panics about girls’ violence; the positionality of women in male-dominated criminal–legal domains (such as policing and corrections); hyper-sexualized media culture and pornography; commodification and trafficking of girls and women; and the demonization of girls and women of colour.

Contemporary feminist criminologists prioritize women’s experiences, attitudes and behaviours, whilst acknowledging that they differ by class, race, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality, and that the form of women’s oppression varies. Although a critical examination of the role of gender/ sex constructions of crime and crime control is paramount, not all feminist criminologists examine women’s experiences, as highlighted in the study of masculinities.